It's been a couple of days, but I thought I should show this one to you guys.
What we have here is a Swing Deluxe strat.

I kinda want to introduce my new guitar, and at the same time show the quality you can get from an overseas production when done right.

Swing is a South Korean guitar brand that usually makes pretty high quality mid-range priced guitars (about 200-750 USD range) for the domestic market.
I believe a very few of their guitars made it to Europe at one point?
(if you search Youtube, there's a Guitar World review of their piezo model called Prism)

When I came here in 2010 and tried one of my cousin's lower end model, I was pretty blown away by the quality(the fret ends were sealed w/ rosewood so that they wouldn't pop out... on a 200 dollar guitar)

Now, I finally got my hand on their highest priced model, the Deluxe.

This is a discontinued model; the previous owner bought it new couple of months ago, and left it in the case ever since; never played.

As you can see, everything from wood materials to hardwares down to electronics are pretty impressive.

Finally, check out the finishing details:

Each fret end has been hand-filed to be as round as a ball.

The neck joint is slanted, and the lower cutaway has been sanded down for a round grip. This is exactly like my 2008 Suhr Classic.

Now this baby cost me a little less than 700 USD.
That's slightly more than the usual used price of the same model, because mine was pretty much brand new.
The normal used price of this one is about 550-600 USD.
For this level of an instrument, I think that's a steal
(granted, it doesn't show up in the used market that often, having been discontinued for some years and all)

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The only thing that I don't like too much about the guitar is that
the neck single coil has a bit too much higher-end than* I would have liked,
while the bridge humbucker doesn't open up as much under heavy gain.

These are actually my first Seymour Duncans, but I don't really find them to my taste.

The bite in the single coils isn't bad (I'm kinda starting to like the clarity), but I might change the humbucker to something like evh wolfgang or frankie pickup.

I personally wouldn't pay $700 for a used Korean guitar (at that price there's USA built stuff like Carvin etc), but I know about well built overseas axes. One of my main guitars is Chinese, I paid $140 for it and it's mindblowing. Enjoy it!

I personally wouldn't pay $700 for a used Korean guitar (at that price there's USA built stuff like Carvin etc), but I know about well built overseas axes. One of my main guitars is Chinese, I paid $140 for it and it's mindblowing. Enjoy it!

you would not believe how much they overcharge for a Carvin in Korea.
In fact, pretty much all Made in USA guitars are grossly overcharged, and this changes things a bit when making a choice with limited budget.

the last two Carvin BOLT models that I saw on the used market were sold for something like 1200 USD and 1500 USD each...

That's just how the JB (or most humbuckers in general) sound with 250K pots (which you usually use in a Strat so the singlecoils don't sound shrill). There's a couple of things you can do about that:
- wire the guitar with 2 volumes (500K for the HB, 250K for the SCs and maybe a no-load 250K tone pot)
- use 500K pots and wire some capacitors to tame the treble of the SCs
- use 500K pots and swap the singlecoils for stacked/noiseless ones
- swap the humbucker for something that handles 250K pots better (although the JB is supposed to be one of the best in that category)